Sunday, February 9, 2014

Thanks to the Russians having passed a slew of anti-LGBTQ legislation, there has been a growing chorus of outraged voices calling for either a boycott or an outright relocation of this year’s Winter Olympics in protest. That’s not going to happen. The 22nd Winter Games are going ahead in sunny Sochi. And while it’s certainly true that there is a certain bitter irony to holding, say, a figure skating competition in a country that has just legalized gay-bashing, it’s easy to lose sight of the even bigger problem facing the Olympics: the fact that they’re pathetically out-dated and brain-numbingly boring.

You don’t have to be terribly interested in the Olympics to know they’re in serious trouble. At no time in the hundred-plus years since a French aristocrat revived this Pagan ritual in a failed attempt to prepare his countrymen for the coming century of Total War has the situation been so grim. Contrary to the nostalgic whining of understandably bitter former Olympians — whom the networks regularly trot out in a misguided attempt to impart historical gravitas to an event that is irreversibly rooted in The Now — the problems have nothing to do with performance-enhancing drugs, or crass commercialization, or the emerging dominance of eugenically engineered hermaphrodites from China. No.

The problem, in a word, is familiarity. And as you already know, familiarity breeds contempt. Tradition is one thing, but in this six-second-maximum viral Vine video world of ours, the Games as they stand are positively rut-stuck.

How much longer can the world’s atrocity-primed, vicarious intensity junkies go on pretending to care about wholly interchangeable, monomaniacal sports-obsessives performing the same old competitions in the same old way, time after time after time? The difference between performances among top athletes is now measured in milliseconds and millimeters, barely perceptible to the human eye. Either that, or they’re dependent upon the whim of “judges” blinded by patriotic fervor and susceptible to bribes and threats. Aside from the frustration caused by the occasional outrageous decision, the Olympics are about as compelling to watch as vomit drying.

But the Olympic Games can be saved. And yer old pal Jerky figures he’s just the man to do the saving. In fact, I feel as though my total disinterest in all things sports will paradoxically help me bring a fresh perspective to the situation at hand!